Microsoft eliminates Chrome

All our clients use Windows and all testing was done on various versions of the Windows OS. After Edge became chromium based we recommended sites use Edge because it worked and they did not have to install third party software.

Those are about all the ones I keep. I have some dictionary add-ons too. The add-ons page in FireFox has a search box that says "Find more add-ons". Just type something that comes into your mind and it will list the add-ons that may match what you want.

I found all those video download add-ons by typing "video download" into the search box. I usually try the ones with the highest score in the reviews and with the largest number of "users".

rbowman wrote on 2/10/2024 10:45 PM:

I mainly use Edge to edit and fill out PDF forms. Besides that, I use Edge to read aloud the content of the webpage so I can do something else while listening. It is very handy when I want to read a 20-page long research article on the web.You can click the icon 'A' or the icon that looks like 'a loudspeaker on top of an open book' to get Edge to start reading out loud.

You can choose a different voice from the "Voice options" drop-down menu while reading is in progress. Microsoft's voice synthesizer deployed in Microsoft Edge is very realistic. It is a quantum leap. I think it is better than Google's voice synthesizer.

Did they mention that it is difficult to count Linux users? It is probably between double or triple the 5%.

I read the analysis of such years ago and do not remember the specifics. Read my user agent string in FF and you'd think I was on Windows 11 and not Fedora 39.

Linux is a far better, and not by a little, but by a lot, than Windows, but Windows has won the applications wars. Most of my customers do not even know what operating system they are running. They only care if their apps work.

I have four Windows virtual machines running to accommodate whatever my customers are up to.

Interesting, I program on Linux and run them on Windows 11. The virtual machines are networked with the base.

Without Windows poor quality, I would not have a job.

I go both ways. Except for GUIs I use the dotnet SDK on Linux and Windows interchangeably. At work the legacy code base was developed on AIX so it runs on Linux as well as Windows using the NutCracker runtime and PTC X server. The GUIs are Motif.

Most of the stuff I use is also cross-platform, Postgres, QGIS and the related utilities, SQLite, VSCode, gVim, Thunderbird, and so forth and so on. With a KDE desktop it would be hard to tell what OS I am using from a screenshot.

Then there is WSL. It's a lot easier to get a tile server up and running with WSL than Windows, and if you use Docker it's either on WSL or Hyper-V with the LinuxToolkit.

I never tried that but I'm text oriented. I can read and retain faster and better than listening.

When Edge first came out, I tried it. It would not let me connect to my email on a Yahoo server. I just figured "screw you" and never tried at again. Chrome does everything I need.

I had also tried Edge long time ago and gave up on it. I have eventually returned to check it out. I found that Edge has become a different animal. I like Edge now, but I still prefer FireFox. I only turn to Edge to do something Firefox does not excel in, like filling out PDF forms and reading out loud the content of the webpage. There are add-ons in FireFox for those, but Edge simply does better job without add-ons.

Edge v.1 was a Microsoft production based on IE. In a move that must have hurt like hell Edge v.2 is built on the Chromium codebase which was developed by Google. MS adds their own secret sauce. Along with Chrome, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and others are Chromium based.

It's puzzled me that while MS has made some missteps they never were able to come up with a good browser.

Microsoft Windows has already dominated the computer OS market. MS Office has dominated the office software market. Microsoft has driven Lotus 1-2-3 out of spreadsheet business with MS Excel. Microsoft Word has driven WordStar and WordPerfect out of word processing business. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer web browser into Windows95 for free and drove Netscape out of business.

Bill Gates has money coming out of his ears now. He might have become a Confucian or a Zen Buddhist in his old age, and decided to 'live and let live'. That's why he didn't want to make a killer web browser. God bless him.

Hopefully he follows Leonard Cohen's path and goes into a Zen monastery while a close friend robs him blind.